BOXCOPY 2008

LOSSLESS is the first exhibition for Boxcopy at their new location, Studio 3.10, Level 3, Metro Arts, opening on 24 July at 6pm. LOSSLESS presents video art that displays a disregard or sense of indifference for the quality of the video image. This is not an unusual characteristic as the medium has emerged out of a guerrilla and amateur tradition that has often rebelled against established standards and conventions. In a techno-savvy society where audiovisual technologies are so readily available, such artists employ the video medium to address concerns that are more personally motivated than technically driven. By referencing the term lossless, a type of data compression that retains the exact original data rather than achieving an approximation, this exhibition responds to the evolving capacities of the video medium, showing that there is still more to video than achieving ‘perfect’ representation.

Whatever Works is a solo exhibition by Germaine Woodward that presents an installation of domestic objects, digital photography and painting. When making art, Woodward finds herself drawn to irreverent humour and the grotesque natural properties of the female body. The performative interchange between the artist and those she comes in contact with in her everyday life are present in her installation at Boxcopy. The artist acknowledges the disappointments and frustrations that emerge out of real life relationships and collaborations by communicating a dismissive stance through the title, Whatever Works. In this show, the artist battles with her own serious intentions for the work and the continual decent into adolescent humour and rebellion against this very attitude.

Boxcopy’s group exhibition, A Street Art Exhibition, might not be quite what you’d expect. There won’t be graffiti, and it won’t include stencils or stickers. We’re adamant that it’s Street Art, although after visiting you may need to reconsider what Street Art actually is. Opening on 26 September at 6pm, this group exhibition will present a range of negotiations taking place between contemporary artists, their work, and the street. The artists engage with footpaths, rubbish, roads, highways, freeways, expressways and motorways, identifying the street as a complex social site as well as a stretch of grey tarmac for cars to drive along. Renovating a term increasingly defined through accepted representations of graffiti culture, A Street Art Exhibition shows evidence of artists continuing to re-evaluate an engagement between art and the street in a manner separated from the popular vernacular.

The decision to exhibit the artwork of Ernest Olove could be considered a brave move. This self-proclaimed artist, social activist, libertine and trend oracle from ‘Kupa Piti’ has no formal training in art, and is from all accounts a misanthrope with a particular contempt for the art world. The only reason that we became aware of him was that he identified Boxcopy (from our website), as the type of “radical future” of art spaces that he believed should be allowed to exhibit his “vision” for world peace. And to our surprise when we finally saw his “vision” we also came to believe that what he proposed was actually possible, that this noble concept of a world without war could be a real possibility. So finally we felt obliged to share his visionary concept, to allow everyone to rejoice in the simplicity, the elegance of that vision – to embrace World Peace for Video Art. This truly is Art for the new millennium.

Culture Vultures is an exhibition that brings together the work of artists who, in some form or another, address the presence and effects of popular culture in their lives. Their practices are fed by mass media – so that as they pick through and consume its ‘cultural carrion’, these artists produce works that creatively and critically engage with pop culture’s numerous and ever-present forms. In his 1984 book, The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel De Certeau made an argument that pop culture audiences need not be regarded merely as consumers who passively and blithely ingest all that is doled out to them. Instead, he argued that consumers could be ‘active readers’, tactically navigating through the cultural terrain, selecting and appropriating elements from many different cultural forms in order to develop new understandings of their own social experiences.